January 20, 1942:
"The Wannsee Conference of top Nazi leaders is held in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee; attending are Heydrich, Meyer, Leibbrandt, Stuckart, Neumann, Freisler, Bühler, Luther, Klopfer, Kritzinger, Hofmann, Müller, Eichmann, Schöngarth, and Lange.
Discussion pertains to the number of European Jews still to be dealt with, the future of slave labor, the separation of Jewish men from Jewish women, mass deportations, and extermination: the "Final Solution."
According to the protocol of the meeting, five million Jews in the USSR are marked for death (including nearly three million in the Ukraine), 700,000 in the Unoccupied Zone of France, 5600 in Denmark, and 200 in Albania. Figures also are given for nations not yet under Nazi control, including England (330,000), Spain (6000), Switzerland (18,000), Sweden (18,000), and Turkey (55,500). The total meeting time is less than 90 minutes."
The Wannsee Conference
"In November 1940 Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security Main Office, arranged for the Nordhav SS Foundation to buy an impressive lakeside villa at Wannsee, an affluent suburb of Berlin.
It became a guest house for both SS officers and visiting police.
The Wannsee Haus (pictured) is best known, however, for an important meeting that Heydrich convened there on January 20, 1942.
"Mass shootings of Jews in the East had begun seven months earlier.
At Chelmno, Poland, the gassing of Jews had started in early December.
Thus, the Wannsee Conference did not initiate the "Final Solution"; rather, Heydrich used the meeting to orchestrate it.
"High-ranking officials in the SS and key Reich ministries received Heydrich's invitations to the conference. Nearly all knew about the deportations and killings already in progress. Nevertheless, Heydrich expected objections to his agenda, which required eliminating European Jewry by murder or "extermination through work."
"His worry was unnecessary. The participants stated their views about details--where the Final Solution should have priority, what to do with Mischlinge (part-Jewish offspring of mixed marriages), and whether to exempt skilled Jewish workers--but members were generally enthusiastic about Heydrich's basic plan.
"Besides Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer who prepared the meeting records, 13 men attended the Wannsee Conference.
Representing the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories (primarily Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia) were Dr. Alfred Meyer, who held a Ph.D. in political science, and Dr. Georg Leibbrandt, whose study of theology, philosophy, history, and economics had also given him a doctorate.
"Six others had advanced degrees in law. Coauthor of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart represented the Ministry of the Interior. Dr. Roland Freisler came from the Ministry of Justice.
He would later preside over the Volksgerichtshof (People's Court), whose show trials would condemn nearly 1200 German dissidents to death.
"Dr. Josef Bühler would argue that the Generalgouvernement in Occupied Poland, the territory he represented, should be the Final Solution's priority target.
Gerhard Klopfer worked under Martin Bormann as director of the Nazi Party Chancellery's legal division, where he was especially concerned with Nazi racial policies.
Dr. Karl Eberhard Schöngarth and Dr. Rudolf Lange served security and police interests in Poland and other Nazi-occupied territories in Eastern Europe.
"The conference's other participants included Martin Luther, Friedrich Kritzinger, Otto Hofmann, Erich Neumann, and Heinrich Müller.
The men who planned, ate, and drank at the Wannsee Haus on January 20, 1942, were neither uneducated nor uninitiated as outlines for the Final Solution were put on the table.
When Hitler's Berlin speech of January 30 proclaimed that "the results of this war will be the total annihilation of the Jews," these men could nod in well-founded agreement."